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"You can call me anything in the book when I was younger. Just
don't call me African," Jason Reynolds told me. That, he said, was "the
worst insult a dark-skinned boy, as a child, ever got."

"Africa," he explained, "is still equated to savage."

Reynolds, a student at the University of Maryland (UM), was not
talking about racist remarks by white people. In fact, many white people
don't have a clue that "colorism," the kind of prejudice Reynolds was
talking about, even exists. Among black Americans, however, it's an open
secret.

"I've benefited from the colorism, because I'm light-skinned,
because I've always had the long, straight hair," said another black UM
student, Marquita Briscoe. "I thought I was just pretty." In music videos,
it often turns out, both light- and dark-skinned African-American women can
be sexy  just not in the same way. "The darker the woman is," said Karen
Morrison, also of UM, "she takes on what I refer to as . . . a 'ho' complex.
She is the prostitute."

"The lighter a woman is, well, she's the goddess," said
Morrison, who is dark. "She's the untouchable. She is the woman that all the
men in the video aspire to have."

Apparently, a shade close to white is useful if you want to play
a successful character in the movies. Mel Jackson, who played a business
executive in "Soul Food," says light-skinned men like him tend to get those
white-collar roles. "If the character's supposed to be more successful or
more, more articulate or have a better background, they'll easily cast me in
that character."

The Black Power movement was supposed to change colorist
attitudes, and it did change some things in Hollywood. Dark-skinned male
stars like Richard Roundtree began to get roles as action heroes. And now
there are plenty of dark-skinned stars, such as Oscar winners Denzel
Washington, Jamie Foxx and Morgan Freeman.

Washington, Foxx and Freeman, however, are men. If a black
actress is to become a leading lady, she'd better be light, or maybe
Hispanic. Wendy Raquel Robinson plays upscale roles. "I do have some peers
that are a lot darker than myself," she says. "They don't get the
opportunities."

Is colorism universal among black Americans? That's like asking
whether racism is universal among white (or black, or Asian, or Hispanic)
Americans. Some are openly prejudiced. Others may feel no bias at all.

But research suggests that colorism is in fact prevalent in real
life, among both black and white Americans. In an experiment supervised by
Connecticut College social psychologist Jason Nier, test subjects were asked
to look at photos of faces, and then rate how smart they thought the people
in the photographs were. Mixed in with the 60 photos were pictures of the
same person, altered to look darker. In that and similar tests, the
lighter-skinned people were perceived to be smarter and wealthier, even
happier. Both whites and blacks often gave lower scores to people with
darker skin.

Historians say the friction among some blacks of different
shades began during slavery, because light-skinned blacks, often the
children of slaves and their white masters, got better treatment. "They were
the ones who maybe worked in the house," says historian Anthony Browder, "as
opposed to the darker-skinned Africans who worked in the fields, who were
beaten more readily."

Author Marita Golden says the association of light skin with
privilege continued after slavery, preserved by the lighter black Americans
themselves. They formed "blue vein" societies, organizations just for people
whose blue veins could be seen through their skin. And to get into some
churches, fraternities and nightclubs, you might have to pass the "paper bag
test." "The paper bag would be held against your skin," Golden explains.
"And if you were darker than the paper bag, you weren't admitted."

In Spike Lee's movie "School Daze," characters called one
another such names as "high yellow heifer," "tar baby" and even "wannabe
white." Lee was criticized by some blacks for being too honest about
colorism. But this is a problem America has to face. It subverts the goal of
a society in which we are judged only on individual merit. Colorism cannot
be fought, even in our own minds, if we do not identify it.

It's one more thing to think about when we talk about a
color-blind society.

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